Christmas stocking blog post

Click on the pudding for the first treat.

x-mas pudding via the NYPL digital image gallery

I won’t make you unwrap the next one. It’s Ben Hinds’s “All I Want For Christmas (Is A Go-Go Girl).”

Santa and his reindeer are all tripping their faces off! Click on the Santa below for an interesting article on how “many of the symbols and icons we associate with Christmas celebrations are actually derived from the shamanistic traditions of the tribal peoples of pre-Christian Northern Europe.”

There, now you are ready for Mark E. Smith reading a Christmas ghost story by H.P. Lovecraft.

If you’re going to listen you should have a yule log going at the same time for maximum effect. Here is more than two hours of hot yule log action for you.

yule log via this helpful Gothamist post about NYC bars with fireplaces

English readers can go on spacing out in front of the yule log while this next one plays because it will probably be familiar. A small survey of Americans reveals that almost none of us have seen it. Slade doing “Merry Christmas Everybody” on Top of the Pops. A fascinating cultural hairdo artifact!

Semi-related inspiration for how to do your eyelashes for Christmas dinner: Carnaby Street at Christmas in the 60s:

photo via Retro to Go

Are you baking a massive pile of cookies? I am. If you are too, you will be very pleased with the butter calculator I am going to show you. You can go from sticks to grams to ounces to tablespoons, etc., like a magical butter wizard. Click on the cookies below for the link.

Bonus extra for New Yorker subscribers: “Tebic” by Sylvia Townsend Warner. They ran it in the March 1, 1958 issue but it’s quite Christmassy. Click on the issue below for the link.

There’s one more thing at the bottom of the stocking: a psychadelic Korean Christmas album from 1969. I don’t think anyone has uploaded the whole album but if you click on the cover below you can listen to “Auld Lang Syne” over at Now-Again Records.

Sorry it’s been so quiet around here

I’ve been preparing my hibernaculum. I’ve got a series of medical treatments coming up that will have me feeling fatigued for most of January and into February, and I’ve been tidying up Lunar Camel Co. Towers in anticipation. That probably sounds horrible but I think it will be OK. I’ve also been preparing to make stuff — not out of html! — with my flower-powered machine here.

There, now I feel better. Christmas goodies and semi-regular posting coming soon. Related reading material for you in the meantime: Sorry I Haven’t Posted.

So disappointing.

The world is stupider and more boring without Christopher Hitchens in it.

Here he is with his good friend Martin Amis in 1975, via the Guardian, via his memoir Hitch 22. Surely those bottles were left behind by a previous tenant.

I was appalled and infuriated by his support for war in Iraq but everything else about him was admirable and / or charming enough that I can, hmm, not overlook it, but . . . not dwell on it.

Which obit to point you to, in the unlikely event you haven’t read any yet? The one in the NYT is good. The Guardian’s struck me as more elegant and humane and I’m going to re-read it now in an effort to sort out why I thought that. They also have a nice assortment of his “most memorable bon mots” here.